by idtm

Created on: November 12, 2008   Last Updated: February 11, 2012

Work is the curse of the gossiping classes, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde.

Gossip is often associated with productivity lost in idle chatter. Managers speculate on the impact of the water cooler and the smokers' ghetto on the bottom line.

Gossip in the workplace is part of the human condition. It is a universal constant in all cultures and societies.

Outside the work place gossip is a currency enshrined in social mores. Bars, clubs and pubs are part of the social network of word of mouth gossip. Newspapers have pages devoted to it, whole magazines cater for it, and radio and television have programming dedicated to it. These outlets feed directly into work place gossip along with the parochial concerns of daily social and office life. Societies without enshrined rights of free speech are, arguably, even more susceptible to gossip as a means of social communication.

It would appear that everyone (willingly or unwillingly) is involved in gossip as a subject, a protagonist, a participant or simply as a voyeur. Such deep seated human behaviour is hard to dial out of the work environment.

The Changing Nature of Gossip

Data on the scale of the issue in the work place is scarce. It is time consuming to aggregate word of mouth gossip, in person or by telephone, with gossip now routinely incorporated on:

Social networking sites

Instant messaging

Blogs

Emails

SMS messaging

Gossip through technology is potentially more pernicious than word of mouth. Apparent work can be converted into gossip at the keyboard. The intent and content are opaque to everyone else.

Gossip is no longer confined to the spoken word or text. Pictures and videos are all now regular features of technology gossip. Pornography to sedition can be propagated from a desk near you.

Company resources have to be diverted to monitoring content to protect against risk to its own legal responsibilities. In extreme cases company resources may be diverted as servers and bandwidth are used e.g. downloading large pictures or video files, or distributing them across the company intranet to multiple contacts.

Gossip is an iterative process with information as a traded commodity. Technology extends the reach to many more than few gathered around a water cooler and the trading process can be significantly more time consuming than mere word of mouth.

Adverse Impact

There is certainly a case to be made that gossip is a threat to the bottom line.

The adverse impact of word of mouth and technology gossip distills to an opportunity

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